Rumors of Ruby’s Demise

Periodically someone on the Internet becomes aware of concurrency-oriented programming languages like Erlang or Scala, and climbs up the bell tower to sound the “is Ruby dying” bell.

It’s kind of like when we talked to Ilya Grigorik recently, and he was talking about how most companies are using lots of binary protocols to link their systems together internally. And James and I were like “um, I think you’re thinking of Google, not most companies”.

Final thoughts – you should, of course, use the best tool for the job. In my book that doesn’t mean pondering long and hard over what the right tool will be a year from now. It means whipping out my friendly pocket Leatherman tool, and only hauling the big toolbox once I’ve satisfied myself that the Leatherman is insufficient. My Leatherman happens to be Ruby.

I think there’s a kind of peer-pressure when you’re deeply embedded in the developer community to switch to the new hotness or fall woefully behind.